Oxide and Friends

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Technology
**Oxide and Friends**

Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/c_318925f4185aa71c4524d0d6127f31058c9e21f29f017d48a0fca6f564969cd0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Latest Episodes:

RIP Optane Aug 08, 2022

Show notes

The Oxide Friends pour one out for Optane, Intel's great hope that never managed to find traction.

Deep Tech Investing Aug 01, 2022

Show notes

Seth Winterroth and Ian Rountree join Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about investing in deep tech / hard tech.

Across the Chasm with Rust Jul 18, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 18th, 2022

Across the Chasm with Rust

We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 18th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Steve Klabnik and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included Dan Cross, Tim McNamara, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

@0:27 let_chains are stable in Rust 1.64
- Adam's tweet
- The stabilization PR, with the full saga leading up to stabilization
- As Steve mentions, the feature dates all the way back to 2017 and extends the Swift-inspired if let expressions Rust has had for a while
- Some Rust features, like async functions in traits, are huge rabbit holes
- Discussion about Rust's commitment to stability and how it's enforced with things like crater
- As an example of the process leading to burnout in programming language communities: Guido stepping down as BDFL after PEP 572 (Assignment Expressions, "the walrus operator")
- Discussion about Ruby also taking stability seriously: flip-flops weren't removed in Ruby 2.0 in part because of this pretty incredible snippet from Yusuke Endoh
- Quines and variations, Yusuke Endoh's Qlobe (reproduced here), their infamous quine-relay, and their other projects
- The G-Portugol programming language
- The unstable features mechanism in Rust ("first class support for experimental features") and how this allows for user experimentation
- Exclusive range patterns in Rust and some of their perils, specifically in tock
- Contrasting the Rust unstable feature mechanism with Haskell language pragmas: the former requires a nightly compiler to use, the latter does not
@18:20 Discussion about the Rust process; going from RFC to stable Rust
- The Rust inline assembly feature (tracking issue)
- The Rust RFC repo
- The Generic Associated Types (GATs) Rust RFC
- hubris is on nightly Rust but with an allow list of features
- Naked functions in Rust (tracking issue), Destructuring assignments, #[cmse_nonsecure_entry]
- Talking about LWN-style reports and curation as a way to lessen the pain of using Zulip style chat platforms for discussion
- LWN is hiring, looking for someone to keep up with Rust development, among other things
[[partial notes]]

Integrating Hardware and Software Teams Jul 11, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 11th, 2022

Integrating Hardware and Software Teams

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our esteemed guest was Jon Masters. Other speakers included Nathaneal Huffman, Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Rick Altherr, Matt Keeter, Peter Corless, Timon, Siddharth Joshi, Bob Mader, Aaron David Goldman, Simeon Miteff, Remy Goldschmidt, and MattSci. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

@4:32 Fostering of mutual hatred between hardware and software people
- Huge difference in cost of errors in both time and money
@9:38 Dealing with perishable pre-preg material Tachyon 100G
- Tachyon 100G
@15:06 The black magic that is DDR
- DIMM training demo
@21:58 Open source tooling for EEs
@33:18 Matt Keeter's take on ECAD tools
- Eagle CAD
- Smaller breakout boards made with KiCad for unit testing
@36:55 Timon's take on EE curriculum
- Math-heavy electrical engineering curriculum
- Arts of Electronics
- Knowing at least basics of adjacent disciplines goes a long way
@49:03 Software shouldn't pierce abstractions in order to work reliably, but people should to deepen their knowledge
@1:04:54 Making microchips at home
- Sam Zeloof, maskless-photolithography
- Jeri Elseworth, making microchips at home
@1:06:05 Oxide gets a Pick'n'Place machine?
- Open Hardware Pick'n'Place machine
@1:09:40 Bob's take on silos
- SMM, System Management Mode
@1:22:15 Vintage gaming as an intro into embedded software
- WiFi Game Boy Cartridge
@1:26:14 Fabs at UNI
@1:29:40 Intel Tofino (TM) Series Programmable Ethernet Switch ASIC
- Intel Tofino
@1:31:13 Google's open source high level synth. (HLS) tool XLS

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

Books in the box redux Jun 27, 2022

Show notes

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Scott Johnson. Other speakers included XX and YY. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Paths into Systems Programming Jun 20, 2022

Show notes

pending

The Rise and Fall of DEC Jun 13, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: June 13th, 2022

The Rise and Fall of DEC

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on June 13th included Tom Lyon, Dan Cross, Tim Bray, Ian Grunert, and XXX. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Pronunciation and mispronunciation
Bryan's DEC reading list:
@1:29:05 Ian mentions Computer History Museum's oral history program prompting strong recommendations:
- Ian: Bernie Lacroute
- Adam: Pierre Lamond
- Bryan: Dave Cutler

Surviving the Dot-Com Bust May 23, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 23rd, 2022

Surviving the Dot-Com Bust

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on May 23rd included Dan McDonald, Dan Cross, Joshua Clulow, Steve Tuck, Matt Campbell and Theo Schlossnagle. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

@1:37 Pick and shovels story circulating at Sun
- Oakes Ames "King of Spades", pbs article, wiki
- boo.com wiki
- pets.com wiki
@11:00 IPOs and public exposure
- theGlobe.com wiki
@18:20 "The Correction"
- Feasting like 19th century robber barons
- Nov 2000, free fall
- Trilogy, Inc wiki
@28:49 Students looking for placement
- Clarity of the bust
@36:35 Billboards on the 101
- garden.com, cnn blurb
@39:13 Theo's story, roulette at Trilogy
Expansion and contraction of CS student enrollment
@46:20 Matt's memories
- AllAdvantage wiki
- Excite@Home wiki
John Talbott "The Fall of Silicon Graphics" article
Fucked Company wiki
Camaraderie over watching your companies imploding
@53:39 Looking towards the looming housing bubble
- During Oxide raise, race against time for VC funding
Pandemic
- Hot venture environment, over-valued companies
- Stimulus, spending on non-essentials, exacerbating income inequality
@58:56 Differences from the dot-com era, more defined revenue models?
- Food delivery services, harbingers of bust?
- Steve anecdote: Dellionaires, margin call day, layoffs
@1:08:12 Dan's second startup experience
- Windows on the World wiki
@1:10:15 Matt's question: can Oxide weather a tech bust?
- Adam: downturn can motivate seeking value, looking away from (stable, pricey) incumbents to (riskier, cheaper) new offerings
- Bryan: dot com bust pushed us toward open-source, for economic reasons.
@1:15:51 Are we headed for a bust? How deep?
- How does a company survive the lean times?
- Negative human consequences
- mammon (money, material wealth) wiki
- Advice for practitioners?
Dan McDonald: controlling inflation, starting companies
Theo: downturn will hit industries differently, concerns over global supply chain
Adam: don't forget about helping others, looking out for other people, for the future of our world.
Dan Cross: if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Debugging Methodologies May 16, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 16th, 2022

Debugging Methodologies

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests on May 16th were Jordan Hendricks and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included jasonbking, Rick Altherr and Ben Kimock. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Green Room wiki
NVMe wiki (Non-Volatile Memory. PCI Express)
@3:38 Jordan's story
- Jordan's thorough bug write-up, (reported by Josh Clulow as "nvme_quiesce() can hang preventing reboot")
- Non-maskable interrupt wiki
- @8:04 Adam interrupts a box with a kitchen knife
- kmdb man page and page in the mdb book
- @14:11 Josh recites a poem about timeouts
- Avoiding getting stuck, experimenting
- @20:10 A previous encounter with NVMe/PCIe issues (see also: Jordan's NVMe Hotplug discussion video ~26mins)
- mdb format character "j" (for Jordan!) (and jazzed-up) feature
- @26:50 Normal and abrupt shutdown notification, breakthrough, writing up a narrative
@32:27 Luqman's story
- The blog post "Achievement Unlocked: rustc segfault"
- dtrace usdt
- cscope, rust analyzer
@43:50 Inspecting LLVM IR, RustC MIR
- async blocks, inline assembly
- boiling down reproducible cases
- making quality write-ups, telling a story, teaching debugging
- popular on Hacker News
- dead reproducible?
@1:03:02 Bugs: psychotic, non reproducible
- Debugging mindset
- Different tools and methodologies for different problems
- anonymous tracing book page, speculative tracing page
@1:10:03 Jason: number literal formats with underscores, now in mdb
@1:12:35 Ben prompts a debugging story, checking conditions in debug, program abort on error
- ud2 instruction
- Rick describes the Oxide boot loader
- XMODEM wiki
- Triple fault wiki
- Rust "heapless" crate

Fail Whaling Apr 25, 2022

Show notes

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: April 25th, 2022

Fail Whaling

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Jason Hoffman. Other speakers included Joshua Clulow, Matt Campbell and Ian. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

Debugging Rails
Jason walks chain of events leading to "twttr"
@10:46 The first mock up, SMS
@13:42 Twitter goes live, early days
- Tcl, Mongrel, LiteSpeed
@19:30 First problems
- Bryan's debugging story, exceptions and backtraces, index out of bounds
- Discovery of the problem was not met with gratitude
@29:53 Jason tells another problem story, production directories full of junk test files
@38:30 Story of the first Hadoop cluster
@42:22 Matt's comment on directory limits
@46:35 Companies growing up, on-prem and cloud infrastructure
@49:26 The Fail Whale
- Ruby runtime, Ryan Dahl
- Moved to Java, Scala eventually
- DTrace and dynamic languages
- Raku, Parrot VM, MoarVM
@59:53 Changing language and hardware landscapes, video presentation sharing, short social media handles, ahl, getting into hockey
@1:12:30 Billionaire's playground?
- Quick diversion, history trivia bet
- @1:18:43 Moderation
- Microsoft Tay bot (shutdown 16 hours after launch)
- Can anything kill Twitter?
- @1;29:26 Matt: what replaces Spaces?
- How could an alternative be built? What would it look like?
- Bryan predicts: change of headquarters, "burning the flag"
- Adam predicts: resale or IPO within 3 years
See also: Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill CTO vs VP Engineering video ~45mins (audio is rough, content is good)

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